Whaling

James Kelly’s commercial enterprises are many and varied, but sealing and, increasingly, whaling, are pre-eminent among these.

The abundance of whales in the Derwent estuary and Storm Bay generates a flourishing local industry, with whalers operating from a series of shore stations, of which there is a cluster along the east coast of Bruny Island. These stations are crude low-capital installations, typically consisting of a makeshift lookout tower, a small number of purpose-built and outfitted whaleboats, docking facilities to secure landed whale carcasses, and the cast-iron try-pots in which blubber is rendered down. Whaling is high-risk for the entrepreneurs who back it, and dangerous for the men in the boats.

Kelly is a prominent pioneering figure in the development of shore whaling. He is instrumental in the founding, in 1826, of the Derwent Whaling Club, set up to promote whaling and train prospective whalers. He owns or part-owns five stations, including those nearby, at Bull Bay and Trumpeter Bay, and another at Adventure Bay. He acquires coastal land to the east of here to secure the overview of, and quick access to, the principal whaling grounds of Storm Bay. The cottage ‘Waterview’ (to the east of here), commands the estuarine vista today, and may have been built for this purpose.

In the late 1820s prohibitive duties on oil are removed. This, and the near-extermination of ‘right’ whales in the inshore, sees the emphasis shift to deep-sea whaling. Here, too, Kelly is a pioneer. His epic journeys in Birch’s small brig, Sophia, a decade before colonial involvement in deep-sea whaling becomes really profitable, were usually the only voyages then operating out of Hobart, and even during the shore whaling days, Kelly has ships further afield, sperm whaling in the Tasman Sea. By the 1830s Kelly owns several boats within a large, local fleet. In the 1840s Hobart is the world’s second largest whaling port, and in 1849 there are 49 local whaling ships.

By now, though, Kelly’s involvement is much reduced. His eldest son is killed while whaling in 1841, and his third son drowns in the Derwent. Hard hit by the economic depression of the early 1840s, and with the ‘right’ whales now gone from the inshore, in 1842 ‘the father and founder of whaling’ (as he is often called) closes his Bruny stations.

Listen

Gallery

(Click to enlarge images)

Bull Bay can be seen from the Bruny Main Road, just south-east of Dennes Point, but the whaling station site itself is on private property.

Little remains of Kelly’s Bull Bay whaling station.

Rocks impregnated with whale oil at the site of Kelly’s Bull Bay station.

William Duke, Flurry, 1848. (WL Crowther Library).

William Duke, Offshore Whaling With the Alladin and Jane, 1849. (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).

William Duke and RV Hood, Chase, 1848. (Allport Library).

Waterview with its commanding view over Storm Bay.

Humpback whales were once highly sought-after by whalers. They are most commonly seen in Tasmania in late spring and early summer, as they return to the Southern Ocean after breeding in warm waters further north. They are an endearing species, and sometimes put on spectacular displays with gravity-defying acrobatics. (Ange Anderson.)